Some classics that are missing on this list:

1. Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics: http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

2. Franco Maria Boschetto's personal website[1]: http://www.fmboschetto.it/

3. Ripasso di matematica aka RIPMAT: http://www.ripmat.it/

[1]: hn discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326339

20+ years ago we had fast and easy to navigate websites, not sure we can say the same about today's websites.

readable dark text as well.

Let's not forget:

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (granted, it's been updated over the years but the style is decidedly retro): https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

And the original WikiWikiWeb: http://wiki.c2.com/

This fractal gallery is absolutely gorgeous - and still being updated! http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/FRACTALS.HTM

If you like that kind of fractals, check out images made by Apophysis.

Let's not forget about the Space Jam site from 1996, it screams Geocities.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

What about it screams Geocities?

From the site: http://www.lost-world.com/ingen/index.html -- whoever made that, I'm impressed.

It loads so quickly as its just serving up snappy little pages in a frameset. Love it.

<!--This file created 3/4/97 4:39 PM by Claris Home Page version 2.0-->

if only the text lined up with the green bar rows, that would have been super impressive for web1.0

Could be done by wrapping each line of the text in a table and setting the background color of the rows I guess.

ooph. with web1.0, you were probably safe making the window fit 800x600, so you could know the max-width (before it existed), and manually do line breaks. otherwise, if the table cells wrapped the text, the illusion would break. the flow would totally suck for copying the text, but that's just a bonusjonus for the DRM crowd. hell, put each word as a new cell in the row, or using a monospace font (could you in web1.0?), and put each character in a cell. nobody would be foolish enough to copy that from your website. webscrapers be damned!

You can wrap text in a <tt> tag for teletype style formatting

Looking the these pages help me appreciate how far the Web UI/UX has evolved during the past 20+ years.

Slightly differingly, I see how the web has evolved but also become less usable. Early web was so straightforward as the HTML tags available were so basic. The advent of comprehensive animations and high-fidelity graphics (and explicit design for web) has resulted in hard-to-scan web pages that (IMO) require far more cognitive expenditure to interact with.

Of course Scaruffi is right there in the top row

(2014) last update anyways